EURIDICECaccini

NaïveOP30552

CD

The producer of the first
Euridice – Jacopo Peri’s, at the
marriage of Maria de’ Medici
in 1600 – reported the event
as ‘tedious … like the chanting
of a Passion’, and reported
‘boredom and irritation’ among
the visiting Roman clergy.
This is not Peri’s but Giulio
Caccini’s version, written a
couple of years later, but since
Caccini claimed to have written much of Peri’s
opera it’s pretty
similar. And despite the best endeavours of
Rinaldo Alessandrini
and Concerto Italiano in this live performance
from
the Innsbruck Early Music Festival you can’t
really call it edge-of-
the-seat stuff. You can have the twangliest
continuo section in the
world but it cannot hide the four-chord,
four-square nature of this
recit-heavy hour – it makes you realise just how
far Monteverdi had
gone by the time of L’Orfeo. But Caccini
was a fine song-writer,
and the rare occasions when the music blossoms
bring delight
and relief. The gorgeous contralto of Sara
Mingardo (Daphne
and Persephone) is the real highlight and Furio
Zanasi is a solid
Orpheus; some of the down-table singers are less
enchanting.